You probably already heard someone repeatedly telling you to drink enough water during the day. But why is drinking water important and what are the benefits of drinking enough water? In this text, we are going to tell you all about the pros of drinking/cons of not drinking enough water during the day and what this has to do with your diet and training.

Why should you drink water in the first place?

Staying hydrated means staying healthy. Drinking water throughout the day means providing fluids for every system in your body to function properly, including heart, brain and muscles. It helps you lose weight, think better, be in a better mood and more. This is extremely important during the summer when the heat makes you perspire more.

This is especially important for people living in the areas where the temperatures during summer rise and become almost unbearable, like in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. We include drinking water as an important item in every diet and nutrition plan we create for our clients.

For healthy people, the recommended quantity of water for one day is between 1 and 1.5l, but during the summer period we advice our clients to drink up to 2l of water per day. Not all at once, of course! It is important to hydrate your body gradually, throughout the day.

If you have some heart problems or kidney disease it is possible to take in too much water. Also, if you take medications that make you retain water. In these cases, you should consult your doctor first.

What are the cons of not drinking enough water?

Water is essential for human life. And guess what? It makes up about 60% of your body weight! Any deficit of water in the normal organism due to heat, sickness, exercise or dehydration will make you feel fatigued. Then you are going to feel tired, grumpy and probably unable to concentrate. Don’t do this to yourself!

By the time you feel thirsty – your body is already dehydrated. Research shows that as little as 1% of dehydration will affect us negatively – in terms of memory, productivity and concentration.

This, of course, goes even further in consequences to your health. Your blood becomes more concentrated, and this affects your heart rate and kidney function. When you add heat to that of some exercise – it can cause you to faint, for example.

This is something that personal trainers with less experience often forget and do not tell their clients – you have to stay hydrated. This is extremely important in UAE, I just can’t stress this enough. We help our clients “train” themselves to drink enough water during the day, and there are some useful apps for that – but more on this later on.

What are the benefits of drinking water?

Most of our clients come to Personal Trainers Dubai with the desire to lose weight. And of course, that is something we are going to achieve and lead them until they get the perfect body shape. There are a couple of key factors in this mission: amazing specialized exercise programs, specialized nutrition plans (different for every client!) and water intake.

Yes, you read it correctly – when losing weight it is beyond important to drink enough water. Water will help you lose weight. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should drink more water than advised. It can help you in the right quantity and timing.

When it comes to losing weight and exercise programs, there is one more way water will help you with your transformation journey – it will improve your physical performance. During physical activity, our bodies use a lot of water. Proper hydration will lower your heart rate, improve endurance, improve motor skills and more.

Furthermore, many of our clients are crazy busy during the day, stressed at work or at home, and they need energy and mood boost. It doesn’t matter wheater together we train kickboxing and fitness or yoga and meditation – water helps the mood in both cases. If you are well hydrated you are going to experience less sleepiness and fatigue. It reduces confusion and helps you deal with stress. One simple way to mindfulness and positivity.

In addition to this, drinking water is very important for brain power. When you drink water, you improve your cognitive performance. Several studies have shown that people who drink water while performing tasks have better results than ones who don’t. So next time when you need to focus try to keep hydrated.

Water has more health benefits. It can prevent a headache since water deprivation is a common cause of headaches. For some people, it can also trigger a migraine. Water protects from a variety of diseases, such as kidney stones, constipation, asthma, or urinary infection.

Need something to keep you on track with water drinking?

No problem! There are some really useful apps that are going to remind you to drink water during the day, to keep track of the quantity of water you already drank and even calculate the right quantity for you based on your sex, age and weight.

Some of them are:

These apps are what I use and what Personal Trainers Dubai clients usually use, but there are many more solutions. Type “drink water reminder app” on Google and find the one that fits you the most. Most of these are free to use.